Mark, Ben, I've just re-read this thread. Any thoughts on moniters 2 years on as I need a pair. I do own a lovely pair of Linn Turkan hi-fi speakers. Would powered monitors give a more honest sound over the Linns with a half decent amp with no added EQ?
Threadnomancer!
That pic takes me back. Such idiotic placement :lol:
Hi fi speakers can work IF you know them like the back of your hand.
There are a couple of things that make actives and dedicated monitors in general better though
Amp/speaker matching - once something that people spent years trying to get right with passives, now something that R&D teams try to get as good as practicably possible for the price point of the monitors. Gives a more linear, transparent sound. Monitors will also tend to be bi-amped with some tuning built into them to let you get them more linear in a given place in a given room, which is very, very handy.
The other is how they handle dymanics and transiets - hifi speakers are designed to deal with, by and large, pretty linear volume, mastered music. Monitors have to handle being thrown around with huge dynamic range changes that are in raw recorded sound on a second to second basis, allow you to hear it accurately so you can control it, and be able to take it and not explode. They are all things being equal much more robust in that regard, and much more capable of letting you hear the sound generally going nuts (so you can do something about it) where a hifi speaker might mask it and lead to the detail in the sound being generally obfuscated and not translate well, or even be damaged by it.
As for specific monitors - it took me years to get them placed and tuned just reasonably well, but now they are, my adams (with a sub 8), when playing well mixed and mastered music, are to my B&W DM602s as a hypersonic, nuclear powered, ninja-piloted fighter jet is to the wright brothers plane. The sound they are capable of delivering is phenomenal (to me at least); incredible detail, stereo field, depth and clarity - I can hear things on these *effortlessly* that I cant even strain to hear on my B&Ws, or my senn HD25s, or ultrasone pr0750s, or senn IE8s, and in translation to other systems; if it sounds like its 'supposed to' (whatever that is) on the adams then it always sounds about right on everything else, minimal tweaking results from referencing with these, so I recommend the A7s.
